1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a method, system and program product for distributing portal content processing. Specifically, the present invention improves responsiveness and scalability of portal solutions by sharing portlet processing duties between a portal system and a surrogate system.
2. Background Art
Web portals have become an increasingly popular means of delivering aggregated, personalized content to computer users. Typically, a portal server includes a portal program (e.g., WebSphere Portal Server from International Business Machines Corp. of Armonk, N.Y.), which obtains and aggregates portal content into a portal page. The portal page includes sections or visual portlets that each contain particular portal content formatted according to a user's preferences. For example, a user could establish his/her own portal page that has sections for news, weather and sports. When the page is requested, the portal program would obtain the desired portal content from the appropriate content providers. Once obtained, the portal content would be aggregated, and then displayed in the appropriate sections as a portal web page. This portal technology has lead to the explosion of personalized “home” pages for individual web users.
To date, the aggregation of portal content has been occurring at a single point, namely, on the portal server. For each type of content the user wishes to receive, a separate portlet could be provided (e.g., a news portlet, a sports portlet, a weather portlet, etc.) to obtain the corresponding portal content from the appropriate content provider. Once obtained, the portal program must aggregate all of the content into a single Web page. Since such aggregation occurs on the portal server at a single point in time, bottlenecking is often experienced. This bottlenecking often leads to increased (poorer) response time and reduced scalability.
Heretofore, attempts have been made to address the efficiency by which portal content is delivered. None of such attempts, however, improve efficiency by distributing portlet aggregation. Rather, the previous attempts generally revolve around remote portlet invocation. Specifically, under a standard called Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP), portlets can be off-loaded from the portal server to other systems. This allows the portal content to be produced by multiple systems instead of only by the portal server. However, while preventing potential congestion in producing the portal content, this fails to alleviate aggregation bottlenecking.
In view of the foregoing, there exists a need for a method, system and program product for distributing portal content processing. Specifically, a need exists for a method, system and program product that can distribute both the retrieval/generation and the aggregation of portal content. A further need exists for portal content processing duties to be shared between multiple systems to improve scalability and reduce network latency.